James Cameron Goes to Brazil – Highlights from the Sao Paulo Press Conference

Recently James Cameron went to Brazil as a guest speaker at the 1º Internacional Forum of Environmental Sustainability at Manaus, capital of the Brazilian state of Amazon – where most of the Brazilian rainforest is located. The positive experience motivated Cameron to do a second visit to the country. He asked Fox to do a press conference in Sao Paulo, Brazil´s largest city, to release Avatar in DVD and Blu-ray.

Travelling with the producer Jon Landau, the actress Sigourney Weaver (Dr. Grace Augustine) and the actor Joel David Moore (Norm Spellman), Cameron arrived last Saturday. After planting a tree in a local park, a symbolic gesture that started a Fox campaign – the company will plant 1 million trees around the world until the end of the year – he sat down with the local press. After the jump are some highlights from the press conference. He talked about Avatar 2, the Avatar Blu-ray, and more.

— Cameron showed five scenes (theatrical scenes) in a 103” monitor (huge!) so we could see the quality of the transfer. It’s impeccable! He said that they took the time to guarantee that the audio and video quality matched perfectly what we saw in theatres.

— The Avatar Special Edition that is going to be released in November will include new sequences that are being worked on right now at Weta. It’s going to be a multi disc release with extensive making of’s and a documentary about his trip to the rainforest.

— A 3-D Blu-ray might be announced in the end of the year.

— He mentioned that IF they are going to shoot Avatar 2 he would love to do some plate shots in the Amazon rainforest – to combine these real shots with CGI. Apparently he’s in love with Amazon now – he recently went there for a world forum about ecological issues.

— Sigourney Weaver is here too and he told us that se might come back for a second one (again, IF they do another), since it’s sci-fi and anything can happen in a sci-fi movie.

— 3-D conversion: Cameron hates the idea of shooting new movies in 2-D to convert them later in the post production. He believes the technology must be restricted to old movies, like Titanic (that he’s planning to convert), and that it must include (if possible) the original moviemaker. For him, 3-D is a creative choice, not a technical decision.

— About the future, Cameron thinks that the technology he helped to create and CGI are now at their prime. “We can refine a little, but the only thing limiting us right now it’s our own imagination. From now on I don’t need to worry about developing anything, cameras or technology… I just want to have fun shooting”

Steve here. A big thank you to Erico Borgo from our partners at Omelete (in Brazil) for sending us this story.